Fig. 1.

REIMS set-up ex-vivo and in operating theatres (in-vivo) and frozen sample work-flow. a Electrical current, produced from the generator, is applied to the tissue and the resultant charged particles are extracted through the custom-designed hand-piece and drawn into the REIMS atmospheric inlet and analysed in the Xevo G2-XS mass spectrometer to produce tissue-specific mass spectra, which are then subjected to multivariate statistical analysis using PC-LDA. Within one to two seconds, real-time tissue diagnosis is displayed on a screen for the surgeon to see. b Work-flow for the frozen samples; all samples collected from the frozen tissue bank were processed with the iKnife. After histopathology reporting 22 samples were rejected from the study due to not being gynaecological or epithelial ovarian samples, or the histology was unclear and they failed quality control (QC). The remainder of the samples (n = 150) and resultant spectra were included in subsequent models, univariate and multivariate analyses